Today is International Women’s Day and this year organisers are asking everyone to #PledgeForParity. Despite the contribution women make to social, economic, cultural and political development, gender parity, whereby men and women are equal in status and pay, has not yet been achieved and is unlikely to be achieved in the near future without significant support. In fact, progress has slowed in many places and where the World Economic forum was predicting that it would take until 2095 to achieve global gender parity, they have now revised this to an estimate that the gender gap won’t close entirely until 2133.

Women are the largest emerging market in the world, account for half of the global labour supply and about 70% of global consumption demand. Failing to achieve gender parity will stunt economic and social development while meeting this goal will bring greater economic prosperity. Global studies have found the following outcomes when women are equal in business and politics:

Higher GDP

More productivity

Better share prices and financial performance

Better all-round performance

More prosperity

As one study puts it “Greater gender equality in educational and employment opportunities fosters faster, more inclusive growth, not only because women are half of the world’s population but also because they are more likely than men to invest in the human capital of their families”. [Read more…]

While it is very hard to generalise, women tend to operate smaller farms then men and generate lower yields because they have access to fewer inputs. The FAO calculated that If this yield gap (on average around 20-30%) was closed, national level gains in productivity of around 2.5-4% would result, which would reduce the number of hungry by 12-17%, the equivalent of 100 to 150 million people. These numbers have been widely criticised both for being too large and also too low. As productivity was only increased on female-headed households’ farms, despite women being much more broadly involved in agriculture, Terri Rainey believes these increases in yields and reductions in hunger are an underestimate of the transformational change that focusing on increasing female farmers’ productivity can bring about.

The SOFA report helped dispel some of the myths and it also generated significant amounts of information, motivating the development of a new publication due to be released this spring. The book, “Gender in Agriculture and Food Security: Closing the Knowledge Gap” is a comprehensive handbook on the state of knowledge in gender and agriculture.

Closing the gaps be they knowledge gaps, yield gaps or gaps in access to productive resources is clearly an urgent challenge and one that could bring about transformational global change, and one that fits with the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day, “equality for women is progress for all”. [Read more…]

Subscribe

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 29,994 other followers

Connect

Search this site

One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?

Select a chapter of the book

Select a chapter of the book

Read about the key messages of the book in our Policy Briefing Paper

Read the key facts and figures briefing paper

About this site

This blog is run by Agriculture for Impact (A4I), an independent advocacy initiative led by Professor Sir Gordon Conway, author of the book One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?

A4I aims to enable better European government support for productive, sustainable, equitable and resilient agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing in particular on the needs of smallholder farmers.

Agriculture for Impact also convenes the Montpellier Panel, a group of European and African experts in the fields of agriculture, trade, ecology and global development.

It is based at Imperial College London and is supported through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation